This thesis deals with co-operation between municipalities viewed from the perspectiveof the small municipality. It poses two questions: How and why doessmall municipalities co-operate? and Which is the place of the small municipalityin a larger organization?. To examine this three Scanian municipalities have beenstudied and one Norwegian municipality is used to provide a perspective on theSwedish discussion.Four theoretical topics guide the thesis. Firstly the core values of municipalities;democracy, autonomy and efficiency.

The object for this study is a company developing and manufacturing vehicles for heavy transportation. The company distributes their products on a global market. Therefore the company is required to have efficient internal production development processes in order to successfully beat the competition. The purpose of this master thesis is to study how this particular company intends to implement their standardized theoretical product development process within their organization and how well it is done. We intend to identify and specify if the process has any unexploited capacity.

The aim of this paper has been to investigate how accounting firms govern their organizations with regards to the complexity in the service that they offer. The service includes the general accounting tasks which through standardization can be cost efficient, the advisory services that entail flexibility, and the relationship with the customer which needs to be taken into consideration when delivering the financial reports. These three components are important but require different approaches when it comes to governing the organization. The conducted case study has shown that the accounting firms govern their organizations bureaucratically and mainly through behaviour and accounting controls. The advisory services demanded by customers are standardized, not analytical, and therefore do not require the firms to take flexibility into consideration.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the three search engines Web of Science, Google Scholar and MEDLINE in regards of recovery efficiency and the overlap of relevant documents when it comes to information searching for academic purposes. Furthermore, it raises the question whether freely available search engines and licensed search engines are interchangeable with each other. The empirical data in this study were collected through searches conducted in the three search engines Web of Science, Google Scholar and MEDLINE. Twenty search queries were used and the first twenty retrieved documents for each query were examined for relevance using previously designed criteria. The documents were scored by a binary relevancy scale and thereafter a precision value for each search engine was calculated.

Plant nutrients are important for all life on earth and are also important as fertiliser infood production all over the world. Because of this, plant nutrients are of great valuebut they also bring problems. As an example, the loss of nitrogen and phosphorusfrom agriculture and urban society's sewage systems contributes to some of today?smajor problems in water environment. Another problem associated with plantnutrients is that finite recourses are used in the production of mineral fertilizers.

Given that the oil prices have risen and the environmental regulations has become more stringent, the interest in operating efficiency has increased. The project has investigated the possibility of producing electricity from waste heat generated in the diesel process. One technique to utilize and convert energy into electricity is the ORC (Organic Rankine Cycle). This process is based on the Rankine process (the steam process), the difference from the traditional Rankine process is that instead of water as a working medium, an organic substance is used. The main component used in the process is a evaporator, a turbine, a condenser and a pump.

Face-to-face communication is always complemented with non-verbal signals that give us clues as to how a message shall be interpreted, but as communication is moved online the possibilities to express oneself becomes more limited.This paper focuses on the instant messaging client Windows Live Messenger and three of the non-verbal functions that it provides (nudges, winks and emotes). The purpose of the paper and its underlying study is to compare the senders' intentions with the receivers' conceptions when it comes to these functions.The study was done as a questionnaire with two different versions of the questions, one looking at the senders' intentions and the other at the receivers' conceptions.The results were then compared in order to look for tendencies. The results showed that the most common intention among the senders was also the most common conception among the receivers, but that the rest of the attitudes didn't match at all. The functions that are supposed to help the conversation flow often create ambiguity instead and lead to vagueness, misconceptions and annoyance..

Ett av de främsta nyckeltalen som speglar om företaget är framgångsrikt eller inte är lönsamhet. Då lönsamheten för företag generellt tenderar att vara hög då den ekonomiska marknaden där företaget verkar är gynsam, kan man säga att företagets lönsamhet borde vara hög i högkonjunktur och låg i lågkonjunktur (Yeh & Roca, 2012). Med detta resonemang borde det kunna finnas en koppling mellan ett företags skuldsättningsgrad, konjunkturen och lönsamheten.I den här studien har fyra olika skuldsättningmått undersökts där det huvudsakliga skuldsättningmåttet är totala skulder genom totala tillgångar (TD/TA). Studien har valt att undersöka företag i branscherna industriteknik, medicin och material. Syftet med studien är att försöka bredda och styrka det spektrum av teorier som finns tillgängliga genom att besvara studiens forskningsfrågor om ekonomisk tillväxt och lönsamhet kopplat till skuldsättningsgraden.

Hammarby Sjöstad is a new district of southern Stockholm built with focus on reduced environmental impact by recirculation of materials and sustainability. The environmental goals aim to cut the water consumption by half and a separate storm water treatment. Thus, the wastewater will be more concentrated and will originate from the households only. The Sjöstad project includes the idea of a local treatment plant for the household wastewater. To evaluate this possibility, Sjöstadsverket, an experimental treatment plant was constructed.

The question formulation in the essay brought up whether Clas Ohlson works today with their graphical productionflow and if that way of working leads to a desirable result in press. After a dialogue with Clas Ohlson it emerged thatthey had certain problems with the material that came out of the printing presses. Certain colours were not reproducedaccording to the stated values that had been developed. In March -08 an analysis of the graphical production flowspresent situation were done at Clas Ohlsons in order to find out how they worked with their production of print materials.In the analysis, their way to work with color spaces, displays, ICC-profiles, PDF-exports, pictures and printerswere examined. Occasional interviews were also implemented with responsible personnel about how they worked withdifferent aspects.Deficiencies were found on almost all examined parts in their graphical production flow.

Föreliggande studie har syftat till att, genom semistrukturerade djupintervjuer med professionella retuschörer aktiva i branschen, undersöka om gemensamma steg kunde urskiljas genom respondenternas beskrivningar av arbetsprocessen.Genom studien framkom det att respondenterna beskrev likartade processer samt att samarbete med medarbetare var en viktig faktor för ett utvecklande arbete. Beskrivningarna av arbetsprocessen tydde på att samtliga respondenter hade ett personligt intresse för arbetet och branschen.Respondenterna ansåg även att retuschörens tidigare erfarenhet var betydande och till stor del påverkar tidsåtgången för arbeten. De menade också att tidsåtgången även påverkas av hur utförlig arbetsordern är vid uppstart av projektet. Det framkom även att respondenterna själva inte genomför någon utförlig uppföljning och granskning av hur det slutliga materialet används..

Syfte: Syftet med uppsatsen är att beskriva och analysera lean som processtyrningsansats i de två olika kontexterna tillverkning och hälso- och sjukvård. | Metod: Vi har genomfört en jämförande undersökning av explorativ karaktär genom flerfallstudier. Vi använder oss av en metod där vi utifrån vår empiri drar slutsatser och skapar prövbara hypoteser. | Teoretiska perspektiv: Vi har använt oss av teorier utifrån Lean Thinking; Specify value, Identify the value stream, Flow, Pull och Perfection. Även Kaizen har varit betydande.

Product development cycles become shorter and shorter. The time from idea to market has become an important competitive factor. Despite this, methods used for making the product development process faster are surrounded with uncertainty about their efficiency. The purpose of the thesis is to describe the pros and cons of ?best practice? methods for shortening lead times and how these methods effect the lead times in research and development.

The standard model concerning the relationship between perception and motility is linear and one-way. It depicts the flow between the two as moving from sensation to perception to representation to computation, and finally, to motility and action. According to this model, animal being is basically a bundle of reflexes. But what can correctly be considered a bundle of reflexes from a natural science point of view, doesn't necessarily have to be true. This conception does not take into consideration the more complex interactions between motility and perception that constitutes, or generates, animal and human beings.

This report is a part of the process of enhanced cooperation between fire rescue services in the region of North West Scania. The aim of the report is to study and analyze how the fire rescue service should be structured, in terms of rescue units and personnel, if no account is to be taking to the current organization. Two types of accident are considered in the report, traffic accidents and building fires. These are more affected by decreased response time than other accidents. Several suggested organizations are presented and they are evaluated with the computer program REP.